Welcome

I live near Rochester, New York, United States.

My interest in life extension an cryonics began last fall not long before my mother succumbed
to liver cancer at 66.

I asked myself at her burial why do we still bury and cremate the "departed."

One would think, that in a supposedly advanced society that we would have come up with an alternative.

As far back as the late 1940s, the idea of reviving "terminal" patients was considered.

At that time, Robert Ettinger, considered by many the father of cryonics, wrote a short story called "The Penultimate Trump," in which an aging tycoon was frozen after his deanimation, only to be revived many years later to learn that many of his actions would come back to haunt him.

You can access this story at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for Robert Ettinger.

In 1964, Ettinger published "The Prospect of Immortality," in which he detailed how the cryonics process would work.

Much has changed since then.

Dr. Jamesd Bedford, a retired educator, was the first to be cryopreserved in 1967.

Not long after he was preserved, several groups tried to preserve "terminal" patients, but with tragic results, as several were lost, and a number of outfits failed, either for economic reasons, or because of incompetence or fraud.

The two surviving groups, Alcor and Cryonics Institute, have slowly advanced the process of cryonic suspension.

Vitrifcation, the use of substances to bring organs and cells to a glass-like structure with little or no freezing damage, has improved patients' chances of recovery by preserving brain structure.

By doing this, scientists argue that memories, personality, involuntary functions (breathing, temperature regulation, etc.) would be retained.

Three factors must exist before a cryonically-suspended patient can be revived:

1) the mechanism to revive someone must be in place;

2) a cure for the malady which placed this person in suspension must be available, and,

3) the means to reverse the bio-mechanical aging process must exist to allow the
patient to be returned to good health.

Estimates for the first revival attempts that I have received vary from 25 to 100 years.

Of course, anything can happen.

I had no problem signing with Alcor.

I believe in the promise that mankind will continue to advance itself, despite what one may see today (conflicts in the Middle East, China's threats toward Taiwan, The European Union's
apparent encircling of western Russia, and the economic crises threatening the United States).

I don't want to be buried or cremated.

I enjoy life, warts and all, and, I believe, with results from a number of smaller-scale experiments and procedures in recent memory, it will be a matter of time before humans and other mammals will be resuscitated.

This blog site has just been opened.

You will find more interesting material at this site very soon.

Thank you for dropping by.